What Is Web Hosting?
Basically web hosting allows you to have a website.
A web hosting company gives you hard drive disk space on a computer
that is constantly connected to the internet through very high speed
lines.
To have a website:
-
Register a domain name at a Registrar. This
gives you ownership of a domain name.
-
Purchase a web hosting account from a web host.
This gives you disk space on a server for you to upload and store
your web pages.
-
Change the nameservers at your Registrar to what
your web host gives you. Doing this will cause people to be sent to
your web host's server when your domain name is used in a web
browser or e-mail application.
-
Upload your website's files to your disk space
on your web host's server. This is usually done using an FTP
application or FrontPage.
You now have a website. When someone types in you
domain name in a web browser, they will be sent to your files stored
on your web host's server.
Types of Web Hosts
Free web hosts allow you to store your files on
their servers for no monthly fee. In exchange you may be forced to
display a banner on your site to offset the costs of your 'free'
hosting.
Shared web hosting are servers that contain files
for many different sites. Each web hosting customer has their own disk
space apart from the others but they are all using the same computer
(CPU, memory, etc). This is the most popular and cost effect hosting
option. Typical price for shared web hosting is from $5/month to
$50/month.
Dedicated hosting is an entire server that
contains only your site. Dedicated serves usually start at about
$100/month and can go up to several thousand per month. Dedicated
servers should only be used for sites that use a lot of the CPU and
memory.
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